Among this year’s Super Bowl commercials intended to pull at our heartstrings was a spot for Carnival Cruise Lines. Over images of seascape sunsets, SCUBA divers, and standup paddleboarding came President John F. Kennedy’s unmistakable Hyannisport accent invoking humankind’s biological and spiritual connection to the sea.

Unfortunately, the negative environmental ramifications of cruises don’t exactly contribute to the pristine marine waters portrayed by Carnival’s commercial. In reality, the cruise industry, patronized by over 10 million US passengers every year, is a major ocean polluter, producing massive quantities of pollution in the form of air emissions and wastewater, much of which is simply dumped at sea with limited treatment.

Commercial vessels such as cruise ships are allowed to dump sewage and bilge water, which is often laden with oil or grease at any location beyond 3 miles from shore; and they can discharge gray water—wastewater from laundry, sinks, and showers—virtually without limitation. These effluents contain contaminants that threaten sea life and marine ecosystems.

Industry-wide, cruise ships dump one billion gallons annually. And Carnival brought home an overall grade of D on Friends of the Earth’s 2014 Cruise Ship Report Card for environmental footprint, including Fs for sewage treatment and transparency of environmental practices.

To be fair, Carnival may not be all bad. It did receive an A for compliance with water quality standards for its cruise ships operating in Alaska. And a decision to upgrade its North American ships with exhaust-filtering technology will significantly cut Carnival’s air pollution, earning the company the New Economy’s Clean Tech Award for Best Marine Solutions in January 2014.

In the bigger picture, however, the majesty of our oceans, from which Carnival and other cruise lines take their profits, can only be maintained with responsible stewardship. If the cruise industry and its partners whose businesses rely on healthy marine ecosystems don’t start paying more attention to the long-term health of the world’s oceans, they may soon find a stark decline in demand for their services.

This post was written by Elise Shulman, Communications Associate at Oceans at the Center for American Progress.

]]>http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/03/carnival-super-bowl-spot-obscures-cruise-lines-environmental-impact/feed/1Another Drop In the Ocean’s Buckethttp://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/05/16/another-drop-in-the-oceans-bucket/
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/05/16/another-drop-in-the-oceans-bucket/#commentsFri, 16 May 2014 15:12:44 +0000http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/?p=133445Yesterday, the House and Senate released the final compromise text of the Water Resources Reform and Development Act, or WRRDA, following months of back-and-forth deliberations over each chamber’s version of the bill. And once again, Congress missed a golden opportunity to secure a major victory for America’s oceans.
Senator Whitehouse meets with locals to observe the workings of a lobster fishing vessel.

Ocean advocates had been bird-dogging the conference proceedings since deliberations began in November because each version of the bill contained a key ocean-related provision. The Senate bill included language authorizing a National Endowment for the Oceans, long sought by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), which would have established the framework for a dedicated stream of revenue to fund ocean and coastal programs and priorities. On the other side of the ledger, the House bill contained an amendment sponsored by Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX) that amounts to little more than a partisan attack blocking any funding for implementation of the National Ocean Policy implemented by the Obama administration.

Earlier this month, Politico reported that these provisions were among the last remaining to be reconciled by negotiators from both chambers. And when the dust settled, both Sen. Whitehouse’s National Endowment for the Oceans and Rep. Flores’s amendment on the National Ocean Policy were left on the cutting room floor.

Sen. Whitehouse did win one concession from his House counterparts: inclusion of a provision allowing the Army Corps of Engineers to carry out “projects in the coastal zone to enhance ocean and coastal ecosystem resiliency.” But the opportunity for establishment of a more comprehensive endowment has effectively been lost.

While expressing disappointment that the endowment was not included in the final package, Sen. Whitehouse took some solace in the gains he was able to help make. “While I would have preferred to establish a separate oceans endowment with broader authority, this program within the Army Corps will enable important projects to go forward that might have otherwise languished,” he said.

“While I would have preferred to establish a separate oceans endowment with broader authority, this program within the Army Corps will enable important projects to go forward that might have otherwise languished.” -Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

Many ocean advocates will share Sen. Whitehouse’s glass half-full approach to the outcome of these negotiations. After all, things could have been much worse. Thanks to the leadership of Sen. Whitehouse and his allies in the senior chamber including Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and the Majority Leader, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), the Flores amendment was stripped out of the final package entirely. And the new Army Corps program is a positive step.

But the half-empty outlook in this case reeks of missed opportunity. This is the second time the Senate has passed legislation that would authorize a National Endowment for the Oceans. In 2012 it was included in the Senate’s version of the RESTORE the Gulf Coast Act, which directed 80 percent of BP’s Clean Water Act fines from the Deepwater Horizon disaster back to the Gulf Coast states for restoration purposes. And now, for the second time, it has been stripped out in conference.

The dual omissions of the National Endowment for the Oceans and the Flores amendment should not simply be written off as a push. As I wrote back in November after Senate passage of the WRRDA package:

There will surely be pressure to cast aside both [the National Endowment for the Oceans and the Flores amendment] in a standard display of quid pro quo. But a deeper look makes it clear that these two provisions do not simply cancel one another out. The House provision is an expression of politically motivated fears and insecurities while the Senate’s represents a huge step forward for the economic and environmental vitality of our oceans and coasts.

According to a report released last month by the National Ocean Economics Program and the Center for the Blue Economy, shore adjacent counties in the U.S. are home to 37 percent of the jobs in this country, despite representing just 17.5 percent of our land area. Ocean dependent industries directly employ over 2.7 million Americans and contribute more than a quarter trillion dollars to our GDP. By far the largest segment of those economic contributions came from the tourism and recreation sector, which depends on healthy oceans and coasts.

Furthermore, as climate change, ocean acidification, and sea-level rise continue to threaten our coastlines, greater investment will be required to protect some of the most vulnerable and valuable regions of our nation, including major cities from New York to Miami to Houston to San Francisco. Earlier this week, two groups of scientists reported that irreversible destabilization of the west Antarctic ice shelf will lead to rising seas of 10 feet or more in the coming centuries. The maps of what this means for our civilization are simply terrifying.

Programs to enhance coastal resilience like the one Sen. Whitehouse and his allies successfully included in this legislation will help address the looming threat, but they fall far short of what’s truly needed to help turn the tide. If we as a nation are going to get serious about protecting our coastal regions and tackling the effects of climate change, we need bolder action from our leaders, not a room full of petty partisanship and climate change deniers.

The outcome of the conference could have been worse for our oceans and coasts. But it certainly could have been a whole lot better.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress. Follow us @OceanProgress.

As former astronaut Kathryn Sullivan takes over NOAA, she faces challenges worthy of a rocket scientist.

Today, the Senate confirmed the appointment of Dr. Kathryn Sullivan to be the new administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She replaces Dr. Jane Lubchenco, who stepped down in February 2013. Sullivan’s background—a Ph.D. in geology, a career as an astronaut that included more than three weeks in space, and service as an oceanographer in the U.S. Naval Reserve—is ideally suited to the challenge of leading the agency responsible for the management of America’s oceans, fisheries, and the National Weather Service.

Yet despite her ample qualifications and obvious acumen, she may well look back and find that training for her space walk was easier than preparing to take the helm of NOAA. By any estimation, NOAA faces massive challenges, from the sequestration-worsened budget crunch crimping the entire federal government’s ability to carry out its congressional mandates, to the global climate crisis, to fishery management dilemmas threatening one of the nation’s oldest commercial industries.

In no particular order, here are five of the biggest issues facing the incoming NOAA administrator.

Rebalancing the NOAA portfolio

It’s no surprise to anyone that federal agencies have felt the budget pinch in recent years. NOAA is no exception, though its financial circumstance may not be as dire as some other agencies’—at least on the surface. For 2013, NOAA’s topline spending level held relatively steady from fiscal year 2012 at about $4.9 billion. But the distribution of its funding has created difficult circumstances for many of its traditional programs.

In FY 2010, the last year Congress passed an appropriations bill other than a continuing resolution, NOAA’s spending was set at about $4.7 billion, with $3.4 billion going to its core functions of operations, research, and facility maintenance and $1.3 billion supporting procurement and acquisition (in layman’s terms, this means “buying stuff”). More than 90 percent of that acquisition budget—$1.2 billion—was spent on upgrading NOAA’s aging weather satellite systems. Fast forward to the 2013 spend plan, and the operations budget has declined to $3.1 billion, while the acquisitions budget has actually increased to $1.8 billion—$1.7 billion of which funded the purchase and construction of new satellite systems.

While there’s no question that the government desperately needs to upgrade its weather satellite systems, we can’t continue to take this funding away from core missions such as fishery and marine protected species management, ocean observation and monitoring, and pollution response.

Modernizing the National Weather Service

Of course, rebalancing the agency’s priorities doesn’t mean neglecting the critical upgrades and maintenance of services in the National Weather Service and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service—the rather wordy name of NOAA’s office in charge of its space observation operations. Extreme weather events are becoming increasingly frequent, destructive, and costly. In 2011 and 2012 alone, extreme weather events caused $188 billion in damages that disproportionally affected lower- and middle-income Americans.

NOAA has made great strides in hurricane prediction capabilities during the past two decades, particularly when it comes to predicting the path that the storms will follow. In addition to saving lives, these investments have led to real cost reductions. For example, improved landfall forecasting means smaller evacuation zones and evacuation costs roughly equal to $1 million per mile. Similar improvements in hurricane intensity forecasting and tornado predictions could pay similar dividends. In 2012 and 2013 alone, tornados killed 119 people in the South and Midwest, including two massive twisters that claimed 26 lives in Oklahoma on May 19–20. We can and must continue to improve our capacity to save lives and safeguard property.

Adapting to a changing ocean

Mounting evidence, including data sent back to Earth by NOAA’s satellites, shows that oceans absorb much of the heat trapped by the thickening layer of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. As oceans warm, currents shift from traditional pathways, and already detectable effects of climate change include strongerhurricanes, fisheries shifting to cooler waters, and accelerating sea-level rise.

In addition to rapid warming, our ocean’s pH balance is changing. Seawater today is acidifying at a rate faster than anything the planet has seen in more than 300 million years. As James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute recently put it in a Seattle Timesarticle, “[T]his change we’re seeing is happening so fast it’s almost instantaneous. I think it might be so important that we see large levels, high rates, of extinction.”

Human-caused atmospheric carbon pollution driving the warming and acidification of the ocean provides perhaps the preeminent example of the fundamental link between our planet’s sea and sky—an ecological reality that motivated the Stratton Commission to call for NOAA’s creation in 1969. As these changes accelerate with increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and the economic, social, and geopolitical costs of climate change continue to mount, the need for integrated scientific research and observation will only increase as well. NOAA’s role is more vital than ever to help us understand and adapt to the new climate reality.

Coordinating use of ocean space

In 2010, President Barack Obama issued an executive order establishing a National Ocean Policy. This action was the culmination of more than a decade of work, and implemented a key recommendation of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy established by President George W. Bush. President Obama’s policy establishes a National Ocean Council, bringing together more than two dozen federal agencies that have some jurisdiction over marine and Great Lakes activities with the goal of streamlining and coordinating the management of our ocean resources.

Government efficiency is a hallmark of the Republican Party’s political message, but rather than touting the National Ocean Policy for its gains in this regard, many conservatives have targeted it as a prime example of government regulatory overreach. They have repeatedly attached amendments to bills passing the House that block funding for activities related to the policy’s implementation. These proposals actually put NOAA’s budget at risk because many of the agency’s day-to-day programs provide data used to support initiatives of the National Ocean Policy. Most recently, Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX) successfully tacked on an amendment to the Water Resources Reform and Development Act that would prevent the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from participating on the National Ocean Council.

While the White House Council on Environmental Quality is the titular head of the National Ocean Council, as the nation’s primary ocean management agency, responsibility for implementing the programs that fall under the National Ocean Policy defaults primarily to NOAA. If the policy is to demonstrate its true potential, NOAA will have to play a primary role in ensuring this eminently sensible collaboration remains solvent.

Enhancing fisheries’ profitability and sustainability

In 2006, Congress presented NOAA with a tremendous and non-negotiable challenge as part of the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. It required the agency to effectively end overfishing in America by setting science-based annual catch limits in all domestic fisheries by 2011. Under Lubchenco’s direction, the agency achieved this ambitious goal. Nevertheless, serious challenges remain to ensure the future health of our fishing industry and the fish populations that sustain it.

While 32 fish stocks have been officially rebuilt since 2000, according to the most recent Status of Stocks report, 41 remain in an overfished state, meaning our best science suggests that their total population remains below the target level. Environmentalists, fishermen, and regulators are largely in agreement that the best way to alleviate these concerns is to improve the science used to establish these limits. But science doesn’t come cheap, so in the absence of a sudden budgetary windfall, Sullivan will have to find creative new ways to protect both the health of fish stocks and fishermen’s businesses.

One potential win-win solution is to allow a higher degree of co-management in fisheries, giving fishermen a larger role in data collection and increasing collaboration with scientists. This allows fishermen’s knowledge to enhance data collection and gives scientists the chance to explain the rigors of the scientific process to fishermen. The result is more time on the water for fishermen, and better relationships between two groups that have traditionally been at odds.

Conclusion

Dr. Sullivan faces enormous challenges as she assumes control of an agency tasked with tracking the complex phenomena of the atmosphere and with managing America’s ocean spaces—which cover an area larger than the country’s entire landmass. Let’s hope the unique perspective she gained observing our planet from the distant reaches of outer space will provide her the vision to rise to the occasion.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress. Shiva Polefka is a Research Associate for the Ocean Policy program at the Center.

Reading headlines about the declining state of the world’s fisheries is enough to turn any carnivore to a steady diet of beef, pork, and chicken. But the reality is, particularly here in America, regulators and fishermen have done an admirable job ending the practice of overfishing and made great progress toward sustainability for our nation’s fish stocks. Unfortunately, legislation recently released by Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) would gut many of the key provisions of the law that have begun to bring our fisheries back from the brink. The bill would cause fisheries to take longer to rebuild and, in some cases, allow overfishing to continue for up to seven years after it’s first identified.

On February 4, the House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources will officially kick off its effort to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act with a hearing on Rep. Hastings’s legislation. If passed, it would lead to devastating rollbacks of critical conservation gains made in the last reauthorization of the act in 2006.

In support of his bill, Rep. Hastings will likely point to a September 2013 study by the National Academy of Sciences, requested by former Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) to determine the scientific viability of one of the Magnuson-Stevens Act’s signature provisions: the requirement to rebuild overfished fish populations within 10 years.

The study praised the 2006 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s, or NOAA’s, efforts to implement its provisions that require all federally managed fisheries to have annual catch limits that cannot exceed the levels recommended by NOAA scientists. These efforts were highlighted in the National Academy of Sciences’s press release about the report, which noted that, “Federal efforts to rebuild depleted fish populations have been successful at reducing fishing pressure on many overfished stocks, and fish stocks have generally increased under reduced harvesting.”

However, in addition to their praise for the law’s success in driving fisheries toward sustainability, the study’s authors also came to some unflattering conclusions about the decadal rebuilding timeline. In the end, they could not establish much scientific justification for the 10-year mandate. In fact, they found evidence that in some cases, the requirement “eliminates certain management options from consideration that could lead to greater social and economic benefits while still supporting stock recovery in the long run.”

Still, this does not mean timelines should be abandoned. The study goes on to say that “setting rebuilding times is useful for specifying target fishing mortality rates for rebuilding and for avoiding delays in initiating rebuilding plans, which would otherwise require more severe management responses.” In other words, when overfishing is discovered, rebuilding plans should be implemented as quickly as possible and include a clear target date by which the goal should be achieved.

Rep. Hastings and his allies might like to paint the 10-year timeline as an arbitrary bit of overreach on the part of their more conservation-minded colleagues. After all, the Magnuson-Stevens Act, first passed in 1976, has undergone several major reauthorizations, and each one has resulted in increasingly strict conservation mandates. But before Congress acts too quickly to cast aside a fundamental tenet of the law, it must also consider history and the reason the timeline was included in the first place.

Prior to the law’s implementation, fishery managers were too often unwilling to listen to scientists’ recommendations about how many fish could reasonably be taken from dwindling populations. Managers frequently set catch limits with a low probability of leading to sustainable population levels, effectively gambling with a fishery’s future. And more often than not, they lost.

The New England groundfishery—which targets cod, haddock, and flounders—is perhaps the poster child for this failed management tactic. Overfishing was rampant in the Northeast for decades until managers slowly began to impose tougher catch restrictions in the 1990s. But without a legal mandate to respect scientific recommendations and under pressure from the industry to keep catch limits elevated, regulators did not clamp down enough. In 2013, following an unexpectedly pessimistic stock assessment, regulators were forced to impose a cut of 78 percent from the total allowable catch of Gulf of Maine cod in 2013.

As the National Academy of Sciences study points out, there is often “a mismatch between policy makers’ expectations for scientific precision and the inherent limits of science.” Although science cannot give managers an exact picture of fish population status—simply because it’s really hard to count all the fish in the sea when they are underwater and spread across massive areas of the ocean, they do not stand still to be counted, and they eat each other—we have no better system upon which to base catch limits. And the law still properly requires management decisions to be based on the “best scientific information available.”

Rep. Hastings’s proposed legislation is based on the notion that the requirement to adhere to scientific advice in setting catch limits means the 10-year timeline is not needed. If we are ending overfishing and making progress toward rebuilding fish stocks, this argument goes, shouldn’t that be enough?

Perhaps. But it’s important to keep in mind that the existing law already has quite a bit of leeway to extend rebuilding timelines. In its analysis of the National Academy of Sciences report, the conservation group Oceana pointed out that “of the 43 stocks under active rebuilding plans, 53 percent of these have rebuilding periods that exceed 10 years—some of them are as long as 32, 71, or even 96 years.”

But while it’s far from ideal, the additional flexibility in rebuilding timelines is not the most troubling aspect of Rep. Hastings’s bill. That honor goes to a provision that would allow overfishing to continue for up to seven years after it’s identified. This not only flunks the straight-face test, but it also flies in the face of the academy’s findings that a fishery’s best chance for success in rebuilding is to end overfishing as quickly as possible. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences backs up this concept with its finding that overfishing can push a fish population past a “tipping point”—a point after which rebuilding becomes virtually impossible.

Rep. Hastings’s legislation also demonstrates the congressman’s longtime anti-environmental bias—he has a 3 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters—by including several needless provisions that undermine sound federal environmental law and science-based management. It would waive any review of management plans under the National Environmental Policy Act; arbitrarily extend the boundary of state fishery management in the Gulf of Mexico out to nine miles from shore; and undercut the mandate for strict reliance on scientific data in setting catch limits.

Of course, today’s Magnuson-Stevens Act is not perfect. And neither is the science of assessing fish stocks. As long as we maintain the requirement to set catch limits no higher than scientists allow, there may be some room to soften a hard 10-year rebuilding cap in certain circumstances. For example, if a rebuilding plan starts with a 10-year timeline, and five years in, data show that even with fishermen adhering to their catch limits the fish population is still not rebounding as anticipated, then some additional time for rebuilding could be warranted.

But allowing overfishing to continue for longer periods of time and setting harvest levels closer and closer to the blurry boundary of “How many fish is too many fish?” will not lead to sustained, long-term health of fish stocks or the commercial and recreational fisheries that depend on them.

Regulators can control many aspects of a fishery, but they cannot mandate the existence of more fish. The math of biology is simple: If you catch more fish, fewer of them are left to reproduce. Fewer baby fish mean fewer big fish to catch when they eventually grow up.

All fishery stakeholders—fishermen, regulators, scientists, politicians, and environmentalists—must recognize the need to maintain a balance between keeping industries afloat now and ensuring that they can endure. Finding that fulcrum means accepting a degree of pain today and relying on sacrifices to provide a brighter tomorrow.

Enactment of the legislation proposed by Rep. Hastings will ultimately prove to be a giant step toward killing the goosefish that lays the golden eggs.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress.

]]>http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/02/03/who-wants-to-bring-back-overfishing/feed/4Establish the National Endowment for the Oceanshttp://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/20/establish-the-national-endowment-for-the-oceans/
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/20/establish-the-national-endowment-for-the-oceans/#commentsWed, 20 Nov 2013 15:33:51 +0000http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/?p=116370Establishment of a National Endowment for the Oceans would provide additional protection for our ocean and coastal resources. (Photo credit: Michael Conathan)

Politico reported last week that Congress seems to be done legislating for 2013. While such an outcome wouldn’t be shocking for an anemic legislative body with a 9 percent approval rating that spends more time talking about a broken website than its own broken procedures, there’s at least one piece of legislation making headway toward passage before the year runs out.

The House and Senate have each passed a bill reauthorizing the Water Resources Development Act, or WRDA. While this law, first enacted in 1974, establishes parameters for managing U.S. freshwater resources, the versions passed in each house of Congress include provisions with sweeping ramifications for our oceans and coasts. The House bill attempts to curtail necessary enhancements for federal management of our marine resources, while the Senate version would establish a mechanism to allocate sorely needed funding to state and federal ocean priorities.

Given the nature of conference discussions, there will surely be pressure to cast aside both provisions in a standard display of quid pro quo. But a deeper look makes it clear that these two provisions do not simply cancel one another out. The House provision is an expression of politically motivated fears and insecurities while the Senate’s represents a huge step forward for the economic and environmental vitality of our oceans and coasts.

Although these two provisions are the only ones in WRDA that focus primarily on ocean issues, they should not be seen as a package deal. And one particular constituency can be key to their success or failure: commercial and recreational fishermen. As the designated conferees and their staff members from each house come together in search of mutually acceptable compromise language, lawmakers should reject the House’s proposal and include the Senate’s.

Prior to final passage of its WRDA bill, the House voted 225–193 to include an amendment by Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX) that would prevent the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—the primary agency regulated by WRDA—from participating in any activities related to the National Ocean Policy. Rep. Flores has successfully included several similar anti-National Ocean Policy provisions to bills in the past, despite its potential benefits for coastal states and regions.

The National Ocean Policy, initiated under President George W. Bush and implemented via executive order by President Barack Obama in 2010, has become a punching bag for Flores and other conservatives, particularly those on the Natural Resources Committee. They irrationally fear that it could make an end run around congressional authority and lead to imposition of new regulations. In reality, the policy permits government agencies to operate more efficiently and reduce duplication of effort while allowing different regions of the country to prioritize the ocean issues and concerns that matter most to them.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, instead of constructing roadblocks to prevent efficient ocean management, members voted to add language to its bill establishing the framework of a National Endowment for the Oceans. And unlike the House vote—which was almost exclusively along party lines—13 Republicans joined a unanimous Democratic coalition to pass the amendment by a vote of 67–32, paving the way for creation of a dedicated source of funding for ocean priorities.

The National Endowment for the Oceans, introduced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), would also give states more of a say in how they prioritize the ocean issues they consider to be most critical, but that’s about where the similarities between it and the National Ocean Policy end. The endowment would create a congressionally authorized fund dedicated to ocean health. Roughly two-thirds of its annual disbursement would go directly to coastal states in proportion to the length of their shorelines and size of their coastal populations, while a second, national-scale grant program with similar goals would be administered by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

In the past, despite its potential benefits to their industry, some fishermen have been slow to warm up to the National Ocean Policy. For starters, they felt their voices were not adequately represented during the early stages of the policy’s development, and that initial snub has proven difficult for the industry to forget. While their concerns were not without merit, the Obama administration and the National Ocean Council have taken great pains to address them.

Regardless of how fishermen feel about the National Ocean Policy, they would be wise to embrace the effort to establish the National Endowment for the Oceans. There is a general consensus that the biggest problem facing America’s fishing industry is a lack of funding for science and monitoring, a shortfall that directly affects fishermen’s bottom lines. The law requires regulators to set fishermen’s catch limits based on the best science available. Better data means more certainty to assessments. In turn, that would allow fishery managers to set catch limits that more accurately reflect the true health of fish populations. This would then either give fishermen more fish to catch in the short term or increase the likelihood that today’s restrictions will lead to healthier fish populations and higher future quotas.

A robust, well-funded National Endowment for the Oceans would give states the option to invest in additional or supplemental assessments for fisheries that drive their economies. It would also allow the quasi-governmental regional fishery management councils, which develop and recommend fishery management plans to government regulators, to apply for money to serve their most pressing research needs without having to fight for their inclusion in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration budget.

In a legislative climate where virtually every potential achievement is stonewalled by partisan bickering, ocean industries and advocates suddenly find themselves with a rare opportunity to lead Congress to a positive decision. The establishment of the National Endowment for the Oceans is a long-overdue nod to the economic potential of our nation’s oceans and coasts.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress.

Sea-level rise is a slow-moving threat that presents a tremendous risk to some of America’s most populous cities. The Center for American Progress visited Norfolk, Virginia, a city on the front lines of the fight against rising seas, to talk to residents and community leaders about their efforts to save the city and learn to live with the water. One thing is clear: Doing nothing is not an option.

]]>http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/07/sea-level-rise-a-slow-motion-disaster/feed/3Fukushima Fallout Not Affecting U.S.-Caught Fishhttp://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/11/fukushima-fallout-not-affecting-u-s-caught-fish/
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/11/fukushima-fallout-not-affecting-u-s-caught-fish/#commentsWed, 11 Sep 2013 19:47:43 +0000http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/?p=107940Bluefin tuna is among the species that have been found to contain trace amounts of radioactive particles from teh failed nuclear reactors at Fukushima. (Photo by Stewart Butterfield)

In recent weeks, there has been a significant uptick in news from Fukushima, Japan. Officials from the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, admitted that radioactive water is still leaking from the nuclear plant crippled by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

The new revelations about the amount of water leaking from the plant have caused a stir in the international community and led to additional scrutiny of Pacific Ocean seafood. Last week, South Korea announced it had banned all imports of Japanese seafood from a large area around Fukushima. And Al Jazeera reported that the cost to the region’s fishing industry over the past two years exceeds $3.5 billion.

Now, fears are mounting that the radiation could lead to dangerous contamination levels in seafood from more of the Pacific Basin. Numerous blog posts and articles expressed concern about the potential for higher concentrations of radioactive particles, particularly in highly migratory species such as tuna that may have encountered Fukushima’s isotopes—including highly dangerous and toxic materials such as cesium-137, strontium-90, and iodine-131—on their transoceanic travels.

Amid alarmist outcry and opposing assurances that the radiation levels in fish are no more harmful than what’s found in the average banana, I decided to dig a little deeper, and a few weeks ago, I posted a brief analysis on Climate Progress. After reading the comments on that piece, it became clear I needed to do a bit more homework.

I began by going straight to the source: Dr. Ken Buesseler, senior scientist in marine chemistry and geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. When I reached Dr. Buesseler by email, he was literally on his way out the door for a flight to Japan, where he is currently continuing his research on precisely this issue. But he took a moment to read my post and respond. His reaction:

Mike-
I like [your] line
Let’s be clear: leaked radiation is bad. This is a problem that needs urgent, international attention. But at least for now, I’m happy to reassure Joe Romm and all the parents of Facebook: your fish are not glowing with Fukushima radiation. Eat up!

Dr. Buesseler also pointed me to a Fukushima FAQ page on his department’s website that he set up to answer the influx of questions he has received on this particular issue.

In the context of seafood consumption, the most important thing to determine is the potential degree of harm that can come to someone who eats fish that may contain higher-than-normal quantities of potentially dangerous isotopes. This begs a few specific questions:

1. How much radiation is out there?
2. Where is it?
3. What concentrations are harmful to humans?

And of course:

4. Seriously? Radioactive bananas?

How much radioactive water are we talking about?

Last month, the Japanese government reported that the Fukushima plant was leaking approximately 300 tons, or 71,895 gallons, of contaminated water each day. That’s a lot of water—except when you compare it to the Pacific Ocean, which is estimated to contain 187,189,915,062,857,142,857 gallons. That’s 187 quintillion for those counting at home. So as a quick comparison, even if the site continues leaking 72,000 gallons per day for 10 years, the total amount spilled would be 262.8 million gallons. This is a tall drink of water to be sure, but it is still just .00000000014 percent of the volume of the Pacific Ocean. Of course, anyamount of leaked radiation is bad, so we’ll get to the part about exactly how bad this stuff is in a minute.

It’s also likely that additional water could seep, or is already seeping, from various other containment devices—hence the news that Japan will construct ice dams or other containment structures to help hold back the radioactive flow. In short, this kind of engineering nightmare makes BP’s months-long struggle to plug the Macondo oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 look like a People magazine crossword puzzle (13 across: Skywalker pal Han ____).

Containing Fukushima radiation is not likely to be resolved anytime soon, so:

Where is the radiation going?

The spread of cesium once it enters the ocean can be understood by the analogy of mixing cream into coffee. At first, they are separate and distinguishable, but just as we start to stir the cream forms long, narrow filaments or streaks in the water. The streaks became longer and narrower as they moved off shore, where diffusive processes began to homogenize and dilute the radionuclides.

Dr. Buesseler and others have suggested that radionuclides will reach U.S. shores “some time in late 2013 or 2014” but that “at the levels expected even short distances from Japan, the Pacific will be safe for boating, swimming, etc.”

Some studies predict that over the next 5 to 10 years, concentrations on the North American Pacific Coast could actually be higher than those off Japan, but the total amount of radioactivity will be well below the current levels near the crippled nuclear plant because of dilution throughout the Pacific Basin.

Should we be worried about the quantities found in our fish?

It goes without saying that we should monitor our seafood and water quality with extreme care. As for the specifics of what to look for, we turn again to Dr. Buesseler:

Seawater everywhere contains many naturally occurring radionuclides, the most common being polonium-210. As a result, fish caught in the Pacific and elsewhere already have measurable quantities of these substances. … cesium [forms] a salt taken up by the flesh that will begin to flush out of an exposed fish soon after they enter waters less affected by Fukushima. By the time tuna are caught in the eastern Pacific, cesium levels in their flesh are 10-20 times lower than when they were off Fukushima.

Cesium will still be more concentrated in larger, carnivorous fish higher up the food chain, such as bluefin tuna than in smaller fish with diets consisting more of plankton and algae, but because it will “flush out” of the fish’s flesh, concentrations will not necessarily mount over time.

An area of greater concern to Buesseler is the increasing quantity of strontium-90 detected in the waters near Fukushima. Unlike cesium, strontium accumulates in bone rather than muscle, and it is not rapidly flushed from the fish. The good news here is that aside from consumers of small fish such as sardines, which are eaten bone-in, most diners will not be eating strontium.

How is the federal government testing Pacific Ocean seafood?

The lead U.S. agency testing seafood for contamination is the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA. As of June 20, the FDA has tested 1,313 samples of food imported from Japan, including 199 seafood samples. Of those, just one—a sample of ginger powder—exceeded the level considered safe for consumption.

When contacted about its testing of domestically caught seafood, an FDA spokesman responded in an email, saying that “the FDA is not aware of any evidence suggesting that the domestic seafood catch contains harmful levels of radiation.” He further referenced a 2012 study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found levels of cesium-137 and cesium-134 in bluefin tuna to be, according to an email from the FDA, “roughly 300 times lower than levels that would prompt FDA to investigate further to determine if there were a health concern.”

How does nuclear waste differ from the radiation from a banana?

Nuclear radiation exists in many places in our daily lives. Perhaps the most commonly cited example is the average, everyday banana.

Bananas have enough naturally occurring radiation that science communicators developed a metric called the Banana Equivalent Dose, or BED, as a means of explaining in user-friendly terms how much radiation a given thing emits. The BED represents the amount of radiation the body receives from eating one banana and roughly equates to 0.1 nanoseiverts. A seivert is the unit used to measure exposure. An arm x-ray is equivalent to 10 BED. A flight from New York to London: 400 BED. A chest CT scan: 70,000 BED. A fatal dose is roughly 80 million BED. Most of the radiation in bananas comes from potassium-40, which is processed naturally by the body, but some of it arrives in the form of polonium-210, the isotope used in a massive dose to kill former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.

Of course, the radiation in bananas is different from what’s in leaked nuclear wastewater. For starters, while bananas’ radioactivity occurs naturally, nuclear waste contains isotopes, including cesium-137, which are exclusively and deliberately generated by human activity—specifically, the process of nuclear fission.

Radiation released in the decay of radioactive isotopes is classified in three types—alpha, beta, and gamma—and each type has different strengths and properties. Banana radiation—potassium and polonium—is alpha radiation, while cesium and strontium fall in the strongest category, gamma rays. The radioactive particles also have different half-lives—a half-life is the amount of time it takes for 50 percent of a given compound to decay. The half-life of cesium-137 is 30 years; for polonium-210, it is 138.4 days.

So while eating a serving of Pacific bluefin tuna will expose someone to roughly one to five BED, according to a paper Buesseler and his colleagues published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in late 2012, that does not mean the potential harm is the same as eating a handful of bananas. But so far, according to Dr. Buesseler and the FDA, we have no reason to fear the amount of radiation in domestically caught fish.

Recall that cesium-137 and other affiliated nasty particles have been part of our lives in varying quantities since the first nuclear tests occurred in the 1940s and ‘50s. While the Fukushima release represents a major influx of the material to the natural environment, when it comes to ocean contamination, it still represents little more than a drop in the proverbial bucket. At least for now, except for fish from the immediate area around the Fukushima plant, Pacific Ocean seafood remains safe to eat.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress.

]]>http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/11/fukushima-fallout-not-affecting-u-s-caught-fish/feed/61Space Exploration Dollars Dwarf Ocean Spendinghttp://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/06/20/space-exploration-dollars-dwarf-ocean-spending/
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/06/20/space-exploration-dollars-dwarf-ocean-spending/#commentsThu, 20 Jun 2013 12:56:26 +0000http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/?p=97180This article was originally published by the Center for American Progress.

“Star Trek” would have us believe that space is the final frontier, but with apologies to the armies of Trekkies, their oracle might be a tad off base. Though we know little about outer space, we still have plenty of frontiers to explore here on our home planet. And they’re losing the race of discovery.

Hollywood giant James Cameron, director of mega-blockbusters such as “Titanic” and “Avatar,” brought this message to Capitol Hill last week, along with the single-seat submersible that he used to become the third human to journey to the deepest point of the world’s oceans—the Marianas Trench. By contrast, more than 500 people have journeyed into space—including Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), who sits on the committee before which Cameron testified—and 12 people have actually set foot on the surface of the moon.

All it takes is a quick comparison of the budgets for NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to understand why space exploration is outpacing its ocean counterpart by such a wide margin.

In fiscal year 2013 NASA’s annual exploration budget was roughly $3.8 billion. That same year, total funding for everything NOAA does—fishery management, weather and climate forecasting, ocean research and management, among many other programs—was about $5 billion, and NOAA’s Office of Exploration and Research received just $23.7 million. Something is wrong with this picture.

Space travel is certainly expensive. But as Cameron proved with his dive that cost approximately $8 million, deep-sea exploration is pricey as well. And that’s not the only similarity between space and ocean travel: Both are dark, cold, and completely inhospitable to human life.

The single-seat submersible, Deepsea Challenger, which James Cameron piloted to the bottom of the Marianas Trench last year arrived at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last week. (Photo by James S. Talbot)

Yet space travel excites Americans’ imaginations in a way ocean exploration never has. To put this in terms Cameron may be familiar with, just think of how stories are told on screens both big and small: Space dominates, with “Star Trek,” “Star Wars,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” and “2001 A Space Odyssey.” Then there are B-movies such as “Plan Nine From Outer Space” and everything ever mocked on “Mystery Science Theater 2000.” There are even parodies: “Spaceballs,” “Galaxy Quest,” and “Mars Attacks!” And let’s not forget Cameron’s own contributions: “Aliens” and “Avatar.”

When it comes to the ocean, we have “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “Sponge Bob Square Pants,” and Cameron’s somewhat lesser-known film “The Abyss.” And that’s about it.

This imbalance in pop culture is illustrative of what plays out in real life. We rejoiced along with the NASA mission-control room when the Mars rover landed on the red planet late last year. One particularly exuberant scientist, known as “Mohawk Guy” for his audacious hairdo, became a minor celebrity and even fielded his share of spontaneous marriage proposals. But when Cameron bottomed out in the Challenger Deep more than 36,000 feet below the surface of the sea, it was met with resounding indifference from all but the dorkiest of ocean nerds such as myself.

Part of this incongruity comes from access. No matter where we live, we can go outside on a clear night, look up into the sky, and wonder about what’s out there. We’re presented with a spectacular vista of stars, planets, meteorites, and even the occasional comet or aurora. We have all been wishing on stars since we were children. Only the lucky few can gaze out at the ocean from their doorstep, and even those who do cannot see all that lies beneath the waves.

As a result, the facts about ocean exploration are pretty bleak. Humans have laid eyes on less than 5 percent of the ocean, and we have better maps of the surface of Mars than we do of America’s exclusive economic zone—the undersea territory reaching out 200 miles from our shores.

Sure, space is sexy. But the oceans are too. To those intrigued by the quest for alien life, consider this: Scientists estimate that we still have not discovered 91 percent of the species that live in our oceans. And some of them look pretty outlandish. Go ahead and Google the deepsea hatchetfish, frill shark, or Bathynomus giganteus.

In a time of shrinking budgets and increased scrutiny on the return for our investments, we should be taking a long, hard look at how we are prioritizing our exploration dollars. If the goal of government spending is to spur growth in the private sector, entrepreneurs are far more likely to find inspiration down in the depths of the ocean than up in the heavens. The ocean already provides us with about half the oxygen we breathe, our single largest source of protein, a wealth of mineral resources, key ingredients for pharmaceuticals, and marine biotechnology.

Of course space exportation does have benefits beyond the “cool factor” of putting people on the moon and astronaut-bards playing David Bowie covers in space. Inventions created to facilitate space travel have become ubiquitous in our lives—cell-phone cameras, scratch-resistant lenses, and water-filtration systems, just to name a few—and research conducted in outer space has led to breakthroughs here on earth in the technological and medical fields. Yet despite far-fetched plans to mine asteroids for rare metals, the only tangible goods brought back from space to date remain a few piles of moon rocks.

The deep seabed is a much more likely source of so-called rare-earth metals than distant asteroids. Earlier this year the United Nations published its first plan for management of mineral resources beneath the high seas that are outside the jurisdiction of any individual country. The United States has not been able to participate in negotiations around this policy because we are not among the 185 nations that have ratified the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which governs such activity.

With or without the United States on board, the potential for economic development in the most remote places on the planet is vast and about to leap to the next level. Earlier this year Japan announced that it has discovered a massive supply of rare earth both within its exclusive economic zone and in international waters. This follows reports in 2011 that China sent at least one exploratory mission to the seabed beneath international waters in the Pacific Ocean. There is a real opportunity for our nation to lead in this area, but we must invest and join the rest of the world in creating the governance structure for these activities.

Toward the end of last week’s hearing, Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK), who chairs the Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard, hypothetically asked where we would be today if we had spent half as much money exploring the oceans as we have spent exploring space. Given the current financial climate in Congress, we won’t find the answer to his question on Capitol Hill.

But there may be another way.

Cameron is currently in preproduction on the second and third “Avatar” films. He says the former will be set on an ocean planet. No one except he and his fellow producers at 20th Century Fox really know how much the first installment of the movie series cost, but estimates peg it at approximately $250 million—or 10 times the total funding for NOAA’s Ocean Exploration program. Since the original “Avatar” grossed more than $2 billion at the box office worldwide, if NASA isn’t willing to hand over a bit of its riches to help their oceanic co-explorers, maybe Cameron and his studio partners can chip a percent or two off the gross from “Avatar 2” to help fill the gap.

Come to think of it, if the key to exploring the oceans hinges either on Hollywood giving up profits or Congress increasing spending, maybe we are more likely to mine asteroids after all.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress. Judy Li, an intern at the Center for American Progress, contributed to this work.

This article was originally published by the Center for American Progress.

It should come as no surprise that a president who grew up in Hawaii and has been known to enjoy the occasional vacation on Martha’s Vineyard would prioritize policies that result in the improved management of America’s oceans and coasts. In the past few weeks, President Barack Obama has met such expectations. His administration released a final implementation plan for the National Ocean Policy that he established by executive order in 2010. It also finalized a budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which, even in a time of sequestration and fiscal austerity, asks for an 11 percent boost from current funding levels.

Both actions show that the administration understands the challenges facing our marine resources and is willing to prioritize them. President Obama’s National Ocean Policy has drawn fire from Capitol Hill, primarily from congressional Republicans who have painted it as yet another example of government intrusion. House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-WA) has decried it as an imposition of a new “job-killing regulation.” Rep. Hastings and his colleagues peppered administration witnesses at a 2011 hearing on the National Ocean Policy, concerned that the policy might constitute a jurisdictional overreach that could make life more difficult for agriculture and other industries with “upstream impacts”—and apparently unwilling to accept the idea that the policy neither creates any new regulations nor kills any jobs.

Message received, Chairman Hastings. The updated implementation plan released earlier this month includes new language asserting in no uncertain terms that the concerns of pro-small-government Republicans have been heard. “The Policy does not create new regulations, supersede current regulations, or modify any agency’s established mission, jurisdiction, or authority. Rather, it helps coordinate the implementation of existing regulations and authorities … in the interest of more efficient decision-making,” it reads. As a result, the policy received endorsements from both the National Corn Growers’ Association and the American Soybean Association, the latter of which called out the plan as a “serious and thoughtful” example of “regulatory streamlining.”

Overall, the National Ocean Council did a bang-up job of taking notes, internalizing comments, and taking them into consideration before finalizing its implementation plan. And it didn’t just pay attention to members of Congress, but also to the folks who commented on the draft plan or raised issues with the policy in general.

One aspect of the plan that drew a great deal of consternation is its call for comprehensive ocean management on a regional scale—in effect, the development of regional plans to prioritize certain ocean activities in appropriate areas. Many coastal regions in this country are already participating in what the implementation plan calls “regional planning bodies,” which are coordinated management entities among neighboring states. In fact, several of these regional ocean partnerships predate even the first draft of the National Ocean Policy released in 2010.

While the final implementation plan clearly articulates the benefits of a regional approach to ocean management and planning, it also recognizes that differences in priorities, problems, and ecosystems exist across different areas of the country. In the Northeast, for example, plans aim to resolve conflicts between future offshore-wind-energy development and existing fishing interests, while the Pacific Coast’s priorities will differ since offshore wind cannot be developed there at this time because of technological limitations. Alaska has resisted implementing any of the principles of comprehensive ocean planning at all, prompting sharpcriticism from its congressional delegation of the draft implementation plan that would have required regional planning bodies to be developed in all regions. Many Alaskans viewed this imposition as top-down government meddling in what they consider to be state affairs.

Recognizing the need for each region to come to its own conclusions about how best to manage the areas that it knows best, the final implementation plan stresses that regional ocean-planning efforts are voluntary, not mandatory. “States … may choose to participate on regional planning bodies,” reads the final version, which goes on to say that, “Should all states in a region not choose to participate … a regional planning body will not be established.”

Even with these changes to the regional ocean-planning structure, the plan received a lukewarm reception from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the newly minted ranking member of the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard. During a hearing earlier this week, Sen. Rubio expressed his concern about the plan, saying that, “Too often the administration puts forth ‘voluntary’ … documents like the National Ocean Policy that, when all is said and done, we’re faced with a new regulatory regime with questionable value and severe economic consequences.”

Fishermen, particularly recreational fishermen, also balked at the lack of attention the initial draft of the National Ocean Policy paid to their issues. Commercial fishermen have been plying our waters since before the nation was founded, and anglers comprise arguably the most populous group of ocean users at more than 12 million strong, according to NOAA. Many feared that the National Ocean Policy would infringe upon their access to fish, even spawning a conspiracy—briefly reported by ESPN as news—that it was the Obama administration’s goal to shut down America’s waters to fishing.

The final implementation plan should help assuage these unfounded fears, as it specifically states that one of its goals is to “ensure continued access” for recreational fishermen and another is to improve the “science that supports increased sustainable fishing opportunity.”

If that’s not enough to convince fishermen that this administration has their back, they need look no further than the president’s fiscal year 2014 budget request for NOAA. At a time when squeezing pennies out of the federal government is nearly impossible, this budget actually calls for an 11 percent increase in the agency’s funding from current levels. This includes boosts to fishery stock assessments, surveys, and monitoring—programs critical to ensuring that fishery managers have the best possible data with which to set catch limits and other fishery regulations that ensure maximum possible access for fishermen today and into the future.

Increased ocean funding isn’t just good news for folks who enjoy trips to Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. The National Ocean Economics Program has found that ocean-related industries generate more than $258 billion of our gross domestic product, or GDP, and employ more than 2.7 million Americans, with 1.9 million of those jobs in the recreation and tourism industries. This research was fundamental to the establishment of CAP’s Blue Economy Initiative, which seeks to better define the economic value of healthy oceans and coasts. Protecting and sensibly managing our oceans and coasts is more than a ticket to a few nice vistas and vacation spots—it’s an economic imperative. And these recent actions by the Obama administration prove that they get the message.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress.

When President Barack Obama convenes his cabinet in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, one might be left with the impression that defenders of our oceans are rather pointedly underrepresented. The Department of Commerce, which oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has lacked a secretary since John Bryson resigned last summer.

Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta probably pulled double duty as Aquaman in the president’s Hall of Justice; prior to his service in the Obama administration, Secretary Panetta served as a congressman from Monterrey, California, and as head of the Pew Oceans Commission. But now he, too, has left the building, with a shout-out to his trusty sidekick, his dog Bravo.

President Obama is seeking to fill the open seat at Commerce, and to replace Jane Lubchenco, who stepped down last month as NOAA’s administrator. During this transition period, ocean advocates wondered whether domestic ocean issues would struggle even more than usual to find prominence in the West Wing. The problems facing our marine ecosystems and oceans are in serious need of solutions, and each day that passes without mention of these answers means another day of devastating blows to our waters.

But a speech last week by Secretary of State John Kerry suggested that he might become the new standard bearer for ocean issues in the White House.

In his remarks, Secretary Kerry discussed a broad range of ocean issues, and the link between ocean health and greenhouse gas emissions was foremost among them. He said:

[I]t is clear that we have an enormous challenge ahead of us … energy policy that results in acidification, the bleaching of coral, the destruction of species, the change in the Arctic because of the ice melt … The entire system is interdependent, and we toy with that at our peril.

With a new blue warrior bringing ocean issues to arguably the most influential group of advisors on planet Earth—or, as Kerry put it in his speech, “planet ocean”—let’s take a look at the top five ocean issues the secretary of state can use his position to influence.

Climate change

Secretary Kerry, who was a strong climate hawk as a senator, used pointed words to hammer home the critical need to take proactive steps to address the looming climate crisis. “The science is screaming at us … demanding that people in positions of public responsibility … at least understand what is happening and take steps to prevent potential disaster,” he said last week.

These words echoed those that Secretary Kerry delivered in his first major foreign policy speech last month, in which he challenged Americans to “have the foresight and courage to make the investments necessary to safeguard the most sacred trust we keep for our children and grandchildren: an environment not ravaged by rising seas, deadly superstorms, devastating droughts, and the other hallmarks of a dramatically changing climate.”

His remarks also represent one of the most prominent mentions of ocean acidification—an issue already taking a toll on Northwest fishermen and oyster farmers, and one that is slated to get much worse in the coming years. He also commented on the rapid, global-warming-induced transformation of the Arctic Ocean that is now underway.

Secretary Kerry’s awareness of and sensitivity to these issues will be vital contributions to an Obama cabinet in dire need of hawkish leadership on both climate change and ocean conservation.

Ocean and climate’s role in national security

On the same day as Secretary Kerry’s speech, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a new report predicting a link in the rise in atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration with a marked rise in the frequency of Hurricane Katrina-magnitude storms, underscoring a point the secretary made in his remarks: Climate change and our oceans represent an issue of “both national security and economic security.”

In referencing the national security implications of climate change, Secretary Kerry is picking up where Secretary Panetta left off. In a 2012 speech hosted by the Environmental Defense Fund, the former Secretary of Defense said, “rising sea levels, severe droughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.” Sustained shifts in weather patterns have already been linked to global instability, as noted in multiple articles that explore the connection between drought-driven increases in food prices and the unrest that led to the Arab Spring rebellions.

Cultivating a deeper understanding of the link between climate change and political instability will bolster the case for domestic and international policymakers to get serious about taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and start dealing with global climate change.

Arctic management

In 2011 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped lead the Arctic Council to a landmark agreement on search-and-rescue efforts in the international waters of the rapidly thawing north. The Arctic has proven particularly vulnerable to climate change, and its sea ice is receding at unprecedented rates in the summer months: The summer of 2012 holds the dubious honor of seeing the lowest amount of sea ice in recorded history.

As ice retreats further and further from its historic range, we will see an increase in industrial activity in the region, including oil and gas exploration, shipping, tourism, and fishing. As one of only eight nations with claims to the outer continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean, the United States stands to play a leadership role in shaping the future of Arctic activities. As a new issue brief from CAP’s Kiley Kroh and Howard Marano points out, however, we are still a long way from forming an adequate understanding of the complexities of this remote region. Secretary Kerry can play a leadership role in ensuring that we safeguard the Arctic’s natural resources.

The U.N. Convention on Law of the Sea

Ratification of the U.N. Convention on Law of the Sea would help America continue to play a leadership role in the Arctic and assert its rightful jurisdiction over the emerging resources on our extended outer continental shelf. Joining the treaty would also give the United States a seat at the table in global environmental policymaking decisions, as well as in discussions that will have international security implications such as the ongoing tensions between China and its neighbors in the South China Sea.

As chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Secretary Kerry held four hearings in the previous Congress and advocated tirelessly for the Senate’s approval of the treaty. Despite his efforts Republicans stonewalled him, disregarding their usual allies such as the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and other big industry and defense interests that aggressively supported the treaty’s ratification.

Former Secretaries Clinton and Panetta also advocated for America to join the 164 other countries and the European Union in ratifying the treaty and to leave behind the handful of hold-outs such as North Korea, Iran, and Libya. Secretary Kerry should continue his advocacy for ratification in his new role and should keep pressing his former colleagues in the Senate to do the same.

Pirate fishing

As a former senator from Massachusetts—one of the highest-value fishing states and home to arguably the most historic fishing ports in the nation—Secretary Kerry understands the value of healthy, sustainable fisheries to our coastal economies. While we have made great strides domestically in fishery management, pirate fishing—illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing—is a massive international problem estimated to cost honest fishermen between $10 billion and $23 billion annually. It also reduces the sustainability of fisheries at home and abroad by undermining international conservation agreements and by damaging the marine ecosystems we depend on for seafood.

In 2011 then-NOAA Administrator Lubchenco and her European counterpart Maria Damanaki announced a joint effort to combat pirate fishing, committing the two governments to “work together to adopt the most effective tools to combat illegal fishing.” Secretary Kerry touted the agreement when it was signed, calling it a “gut punch to those who break the rules.” His efforts to continue the work done by Administrator Lubchenco and Damanaki will pay dividends for America’s fishermen and seafood consumers alike.

Conclusion

Secretary Kerry’s striking remarks last week certainly raised expectations for additional pro-oceans leadership from the State Department and the rest of the Obama administration. The litany of challenges facing the world’s oceans, however, affords us very little time to wait. These issues require immediate, decisive, and politically courageous decisions, and ocean stakeholders are desperate for a champion willing to back up words with action. Here’s to hoping Secretary Kerry is up for the job.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy and Shiva Polefka is an Ocean Research Associate at the Center for American Progress.